China Passes the Torch

...One Western diplomat said Deng played a lot of bridge, a reference to his love of the card game and his penchant for striking personal deals...

...In a rare confession of Communist Party failings, Zhao contended that a party in power tends to lose contact with the people...

...Actually, what did happen at the Party Congress had been largely decided as early as August when senior Chinese leaders met at their seaside villas in the town of Beidaihe to cut their deals...

...Zhao'spoucy address to the Congress, a 59-page document in its English version, was characteristically sober and cautious...

...The political reforms would relegate them to providing ideological education for workers and peasants, a rather vague role that would clearly end their dominance...

...It was not lost on either the Chinese or foreigners that there wasn't a Mao tunic to be seen amid Zhao's entourage...

...This year, Chinese leaders attempted to present at least the appearance of openness...

...There is every expectation that the Party secretaries will find ways to delay, if not prevent, their political demise...

...The proposed political reforms make his job particularly difficult...

...He persuaded or cajoled his contemporaries to relinquish power to a younger generation while they were still alive, and thus assured about as well as anyone can in a one-party state a bloodless transition of leadership...

...The results took everyone by surprise...

...At 68 he is already a transitional leader...

...Yet unless Zhao can divorce the Party from government functions, the economic reforms are not likely to move ahead...

...Otherwise, however, the press conferences were carefully orchestrated events, employing foreign correspondents as props, designed to be shown repeatedly on nightly central television and to give the illusion that something of signal importance was happening...

...Deng wrote a new script...

...The foreign press was invited to witness Zhao reading his policy address to the 2,000 delegates in the Great Hall of the People on the first day, and to watch the perfunctory last half hour of proceedings on the final day as delegates in unison raised their hands to approve changes in Communist Party rules...

...If he is to lead China, Zhao must move rapidly to establish his power base, gradually relying less on the counsel of Deng...

...Two others on the standing committee nearly 10 years his junior, newly appointed Acting Prime Minister Li Peng and Hu Qui, the likely next Party general secretary, are the men who will lead China into the coming century if Zhao successfully clears the way...

...Nor could anyone help noticing earlier, while watching the nationally televised opening of the Party Congress, that 80-year-old Chen Yun shut'lied slowly to his seat—visible proof of Deng's longtime contention that the Old Guard had lost its physical stamina...

...That ideological exercise, dry as it sounds, nonetheless provides justification for a mix of socialism and capitalism as the Zhao leadership turns to putting life back into economic reforms...

...For a time, Zhao will have Deng's political prestige and skills to fall back on should the new leadership encounter crises of the sort created by the student demonstrationsayearago...

...There may be as many as 1 million full-time officials on the Party payroll...

...No wonder then that the 68-year-old Zhao Ziyang, unmistakable successor to Deng, radiated confidence when he held a reception for some 300 foreign correspondents within hours after being named Party general secretary and a member of a recast, younger standing committee...

...Many elders of the Party have been consigned to its Central Advisory Commission, and toldto stay outof the daily operations of Zhao's new standing committee and Politburo...

...It seemed virtually certain before the Congress began that Deng and a few contemporaries would retire from the 20-member Politburo and its powerful five-member standing committee...

...He warned against the dangers of inflation, uncontrolled investment, and of abolishing state price controls too rapidly...

...Moreover, Zhao does not have all that much time...

...In leading an entire generation of aged Chinese Communist revolutionaries into retirement, the 83-year-old Deng assured himself a place in the history of Communist politics...

...Deng remains as chairman of the Party Military Affairs Commission, and consequently commander of the 3-million-man Armed Forces...

...It was a theme he elaborated upon as he listed abuses by officials (bribery, extortion, embezzlement, among others) and criticized the overcentralization of authority in the 46-million-member Communist Party...

...It seems clear now that Deng, with his mastery of Chinese politics, arranged a compromise between conservatives and reformists weighted toward the latter...

...He offered China's 1 billion people no ready solutions to acknowledged difficulties with reform, nor did he raise expectations with promises of rapid improvement in China's standard of living...

...He succeeded in placing long sought political reform on the national agenda, and in winning acceptance of the notion that China is only in the beginning stage of socialism...

...During the hour-long meeting with correspondents, Zhao fielded questions ranging from internal politics to SovietChinese relations to the tailoring of his double breasted blue suit, and the reception was shown at least four times on Chinese television...

...But Zhao Ziyang cannot let himself be seen as being merely a puppet of Deng...

...Correspondents assigned to China in 1973, when the 1 Oth Congress was held, recalled its being so shrouded in secrecy that foreigners were unaware of the event until its closing was announced...

...Previously, Party leaders here clung to power tenaciously, releasing their grip only on their death beds or when their comrades conspired to overthrow them...

...This has been Deng Xiaoping's plan all along, and it now seems to have a better than even chance of working...

...Virtually all who departed were in their 70s and 80s, veterans in many cases of the fabled Long March...

...Midway through the week, four young entrepreneurs appeared at a news conference, presumably to underscore that private risk-taking and getting rich are once more acceptable under a reformist leadership...

...How Deng staged the 13 th Communist Party Congress from October 25 to November 1 is known to probably a few dozen people at most...

...There was just a single slip in the wellrehearsed answers to the sometimes tough and embarrassing questions of journalists...

...As Party secretaries, heading the pervasive Party committees, their importance has derived from their making the main decisions...

...No one expected that he would lead half of not merely the Politburo but also of the 209-member Central Committee into retirement...

...Political reform will be an equally arduous task at the least, but the two are now formally linked, despite resistance from some rank and file Communist Party officials...

...The attempt to give enterprise managers authority to operate factories on a profit-loss basis has been unsuccessful in part because at every point managers still need approval of their Party committees, whose secretaries continue to find solace in Marxism...

...Over the course of the Congress a succession of Chinese officials and delegates were trotted out for press conferences—thus occupying foreign correspondents, and diverting attention from the fact that nothing was revealed about the internal workings of the Congress itself beyond what the official Xinhua news agency made available...

...Marxism, it turns out, is not of much practical use in making daily business decisions...

...Some, like the economist Chen Yun and National People's Congress Chairman Peng Zhen, were troublesome critics of the Deng Xiaoping reforms...

...He noted widespread illiteracy in the country (at least one quarter of the general population...

...As staged political drama, the 13th Party Congress indeed went further than anything the Chinese had ever seen...

...But China's kaifang still falls considerably short of the Soviet Union's glasnost...

...Zhao is a vice-chairman, and therefore an understudy, preparing for the day that he assumes control of the Army...

...Following a week full of symbols, he and the four others in the new political coalition seemed deliberately intent on exhibiting a new style...

...Mark Hopkins, a specialist in Soviel and Eastern European affairs, has spent the last three rears in China...

...One of the entrepreneurs inadvertently revealed that Deng Xiaoping's name was absent from the proposed list of the new Party Central Committee—the first hard evidence that the mass retirement of Party elders was cutting deeper than had been anticipated...

...Their central purpose is to remove lower-level Party officials from the daily control of enterprise management, scientific research, education and commerce...